Part 1

of the Handbook of American Indian Languages. It seems desirable to restate at the present time the development of the plan and the object of this work.

Through the efforts of the late Major Powell and his collaborators a great number of vocabularies and a few grammars of American Indian languages had been accumulated, but no attempt had been made to give a succinct description of the morphology of all the languages of the continent. In order to do this, a series of publications was necessary. The subject matter had to be represented by a number of grammatical sketches, such as are now being assembled in the Handbook of American Indian Languages. To substantiate the inductions contained in this grammar, collections of texts are indispensable to the student, and finally a series of extended vocabularies are required. The plan, as developed between 1890 and 1900, contemplated the assembling in the bulletin series of the bureau of a series of texts which were to form the basis of the handbook. Of this series, Doctor Boas’s Chinook, Kathlamet, and Tsimshian Texts, and Swanton’s Haida and Tlingit Texts, subsequently published, form a part, but at the time Swanton’s Texts appeared it was believed by Secretary Langley that material of this kind was too technical in character to warrant publication in a governmental series. It was, therefore, decided to discontinue the text series in the bulletins of the bureau and to divert them to the Publications of the American Ethnological Society and the Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology. Other series were commenced by the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania. The method of publication pursued at the present time, though different from that first planned, is acceptable, since all the material is accessible to students, and the bureau is saved the expense of publication.

Doctor Boas has been enabled to base all the sketches in the first volume of his handbook on accompanying text series, as follows:

(1) Athapascan. Texts published by the University of California. (2) Tlingit. Texts published by the Bureau of American Ethnology, but too late to be used systematically. (3) Haida. Texts published by the Bureau of American Ethnology. (4) Tsimshian. Texts published by the Bureau of American Ethnology and the American Ethnological Society. (5) Kwakiutl. Texts published by the Jesup Expedition and in the Columbia University series. (6) Chinook. Texts published by the Bureau of American Ethnology. (7) Maidu. Texts published by the American Ethnological Society, but too late to be used. (8) Algonquian. Texts published by the American Ethnological Society. (9) Sioux. Texts in Contributions to North American Ethnology. (10) Eskimo. Texts in “Meddelelser om Grønland,” but not used systematically.

Although Doctor Boas has urged the desirability of undertaking the publication of the series of vocabularies, no definite steps have yet been taken toward the realization of this plan, owing largely to lack of funds for the employment of assistants in preparing the materials. It is hoped, however, that such a series of vocabularies, based on the published grammars and on the series of texts above referred to, may be prepared for publication in the near future. Much of the preliminary work has been done. There are, for example, extended manuscript dictionaries of the Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Chinook, and Sioux, but none of them is yet ready for the printer.

The work on